Hooptedoodle #494 - Google AI Gives Us the Lowdown...

 A friend of mine - who must be remarkably short of things to think about - asked Google AI about my blog (this very one you are reading), and he sent me an extract from the reply, since he thought it would amuse me. At least I hope that is why he sent it.

Here it is:

Can't really protest too much about any of that, though I am maybe a little saddened by the perceived balance. It makes no direct reference to bullshit, for which I guess I should be grateful. You probably expect me to set about checking out all sorts of AI reports now, but no. 

Not going to.

Out of perversity, I asked Google AI to describe Google AI (yes, I used to watch Star Trek many years ago - I know how to upset robots). Disappointingly, the description read much more like a marketing push than an analysis - I shall not reproduce any of it. There is enough bullshit around already... 

Hooptedoodle #466 - Willie and the Bluetooth

 I was supposed to be busy spraying the drive this morning, but rain is forecast. Instead, I decided to phone my pal Willie, to see how he's doing, and if he fancies a spot of lunch at the pub in his village, since it is my turn to pay.

So I rang Willie. I took care to call his mobile, since he and his family have now had their landline phone removed (which is maybe something I should think about myself, though the potential hassle of having to inform the whole world of the change in my contact details puts me off).

Not for the first time, this was a more strange experience than I expected. Willie, you understand, is a big fan of new domestic technology, and is especially keen on spending his money on it, and talking about it in the pub. 

The phone rang, and Willie answered. His voice sounded very far away, and had a serious echo.

Willie - and I could only just hear him - said, "is that you Tony? - this is a terrible line - you are very faint. Do you want to try phoning me again?"

So I rang off, and tried again; same result. This time I could hear Willie, and my own voice delayed a couple of seconds, very faint and muffled.

It took a few moments, but I suddenly understood.

"Hi Willie," I heard myself say, somewhere in another galaxy, "am I, by any chance, speaking to your watch...?"

And, it transpired, I was. This has happened before; the only way out of this situation is for Willie to ring me back - that seems to work OK.

You may picture Willie, at home, with his iPhone in his pocket and his Apple Watch ready for action, listening to Earth, Wind and Fire (courtesy of his Apple Music subscription) on his Bluetooth Air Buds. When an incoming call arrives, all he has to do is press something (or other...) and the call will become the focus of world attention. Excellent. Problem is, Willie doesn't get very many calls these days, and his switchover needs more practice. I regularly find I am attempting conversation with some random device within his Bluetooth range.

He has made a hefty investment in a massive Smart TV, which is networked into his wi-fi, and from his phone he can access almost the entire back-catalogue of the world's movies and music - he has top-notch hi-fi speakers, too, so there is great scope for entertainment, all at the touch of a screen (or something). I'm sure that Mr & Mrs Willie get great value from all this kit, but I have to say that it has never actually worked in my presence. Perhaps my phone disrupted the network. Maybe it was just me. It could be the tin-foil in my hat.

I am not a non-believer, I hasten to add; sometimes I'm just a little slow to be properly impressed.

***** Late Edit *****

This morning, two days after this post, I drove to the post office in the next village, and, since they have a farm shop and tea-room on the same premises as the PO, I ordered myself a cup of hot chocolate and a bacon roll. The place was quite busy, so I took an empty seat at the last table in the row. I enjoyed my breakfast, but seem to have been singled out for some special treatment by the digital gods. Perhaps I should be more careful what I say. 

At the table next to mine were seated 4 visitors with backpacks and heavy boots, so I guess they were en route for Traprain Law, which would have been a squelchy and fairly hazardous climb in the pouring rain. They were holding a loud (and I thought rather competitive) debate about which phone app they found most life-enhancing; subsequently they moved on to apps they had downloaded but never used. This all went on for about 30 minutes, then they left. Presumably they continued to talk about this stuff while they scaled Traprain Law in the rain. I hope they had a mountain rescue app between them.

Seated at my table was a man with a big red beard, who was drinking a large mug of coffee, and he was fully absorbed in his phone - never spoke, which is fine with me. Whatever he was reading, he was also listening to music. I couldn't hear it - I must say these modern ear-buds are very cleverly designed to eliminated acoustic leakage - but I know he was listening to music because he tapped both feet and also whistled along with it, throughout my breakfast.

Of course, I should have brought along my own headphones, so I couldn't hear any of this, but there is something a bit wrong here, maybe? Anyway, I had a good laugh, at my own expense. Serves me right.

*********************

Hooptedoodle #460 - Targeted Advertising - Another Triumph

 Having only recently recovered my composure after learning that I could hire a [1980s] executive jet from my neighbouring village to fly to anywhere I wanted, I take a renewed interest in what a knowledge of my GPS location, presumed access to my Google profile and robot marketing algorithms created by idiots can do to enliven my online experience.

There are, it seems, some very attractive female lawyers who live in lofty apartments in this same village; they all drive top-of-the-range American cars, and they can't wait to meet me. I can understand this, of course.

If I had been worrying about what sort of local experience I could offer these ladies (who are obviously used to only the very best), these same advertisers might now offer some helpful ideas. 

 

Kelso sheep sales? No - probably not

 

Tickets to watch Dunbar United in an Easterly gale, with the possibility of a Scotch Pie and a cup of Bovril at half time? Nah - not really

 

What about a trip to the Seabird Centre? With an ice cream and a chance to make a crayon drawing of a jellyfish? A bit specialised, maybe

 

Fine dining - how about fish and chips at the North Berwick Fry? Come on - is there no sophistication on offer?

 

All right then, how about a river cruise at Haddington? Now you are talking. If you don't believe me, take a look at this, and eat your heart out...

... and, just as a fact check, here is a more familiar view of the River Tyne at Haddington, as we know it. The water is certainly deep enough for the swans, though the old Nungate Bridge looks a little tight for a cruiser. And then there's the weir...

Hooptedoodle #451 - Accidental Progress: a celebratory but extremely boring post about computing

 I'll keep this brief. It may seem an odd topic for a blog post, but someone might find it useful, so here it is.

I've been a Mackintosh user since 2014; I'm on my second desktop Mac now, and I like them, though I have become suspicious of the customer-support politics over this period.

After I'd had my first Mac for a year or so, I was notified that there was a new operating system. As I recall, I was using Mountain Lion at the time, and the new upgrade was El Capitan. Being a lifelong Windows user, I requested the update immediately, and so it came to pass.

Good news and bad; the new MacOS worked very nicely, but 3 non-Apple applications which I had bought and installed on the machine no longer worked. One was a rather good pdf editor, one was the Mac version of a graphics editor which I had used and relied on for years. I can't remember what the third was, but there were three. I contacted Apple's customer support people, and was told that they had no responsibility for other people's software, and I should complain to the originators. Right - message received, loud and clear. I coped, but my view was readjusted by the experience. Thereafter, I tried to hold off on MacOS upgrades as long as possible.

My latest machine is running very nicely. I've had Monterey running since I got it, and I've been badgered fairly constantly to upgrade to Ventura, almost from the outset. I've just been deleting the notifications - I have sufficient investment in MSOffice for Mac and a couple of other things to be nervous about a repeat of the El Capitan experience. Also, I have to say that I had read some criticisms of Ventura on-line which were not encouraging (though, of course, I mostly didn't understand them).

Yesterday I was notified that there was a new version of my installed Monterey available - version 13.7.1, I think. I had no objection to a version change for the existing OS, if it delayed the arrival of the dreaded Ventura for a while. So when it offered to update my system overnight, I took a deep breath and clicked OK. 

What happened next was a bit of a surprise. The machine set about installing the new system immediately, not overnight, and told me that it was Sonoma 14.1.1. Good heavens, I thought to myself, what the bleep is Sonoma?

It took about 2 hours to download, prepare and install the new software. Sonoma, apparently, is newer even than Ventura, so I was expecting the worst. Well, I have to say that thus far I find no problems - I've not lost anything, as far as I can tell, and some of my existing app software is running much faster.

Perhaps my trust should be restored?

Nah...

Hooptedoodle #446 - Onus and the Telephone Box

 Another worthless tale from my distant youth - this one at least has the slight compensations of a whiff of crime and some vintage technology.

Despite my efforts to unsubscribe, I still receive issues of a newsletter for ex-pupils of my old grammar school in Liverpool. This month's edition informs me that a former classmate of mine, Ray Burden, has passed away. That's OK - he obviously had a long and full life, and I haven't met him or thought about him for something like 60 years, so I can only send mental best wishes to his friends and family, whoever they may be.

Ray was a very large boy for his age, which made him a natural to get involved in the school's rugby-playing activities when he was 15 or so - his main attribute on the rugby field was that he might usefully fall on one of the opposition in a moment of stress; certainly he was unlikely to catch anyone in open play. He was known universally as "Onus", since our first-year Latin primer made it clear (in about chapter 2) that this was the Latin word for a burden, and therefore he obviously had to be called this, since we were all desperate to grasp any excuse to avoid the embarrassment of addressing each other by our given first names. A boys' school, it goes without saying.

In passing, I have some faint concerns about that first year Latin book, which was full of translation exercises involving the daughters of the gods hastening to the woods to meet the sailors. No matter.

In our second year, Onus suddenly approached me to ask if I would be interested in helping him with a new hobby, which was finding out the special engineers' codes which would enable anyone who had them to make free local calls from any public call-box in Liverpool.

 

Classic 1950s UK phone-box

I'd better insert a brief explanation of the technology of the day. In those days the public telephones were attached to large black boxes. If you wished to make a call via the operator (which might be a long-distance call, meaning outside Liverpool area) then you dialled "100", the operator would tell you the cost of the call, and you would place coins to this value in the appropriate slots on the black box. The operator would hear the coins going in, different value coins making a different noise (in fact anyone within about 50 metres outside the phone-box could probably have heard this) and would connect the call. If it was answered, you pressed Button A (which required a fair amount of strength) and the money fell through into a strong box at the bottom) and you could then speak to the recipient. If the call was not answered you pressed the equally mighty Button B, which, with a bit of luck, would return your coins into a little tray. All of this was big, clunky, mechanical stuff vaguely reminiscent of Steam Punk now. Lots of girders and grease.

OK - I'm sure this was the same throughout the UK at the time. Our telephones were connected to a local exchange - our number at home was LAR 1125, attached to Lark Lane exchange, in Aigburth. Other exchanges were CHIldwall, WAVertree, ALLerton, STOneycroft and a pile more. If you wished to call a local number from a Liverpool phone-box, you placed 4d (that's 4 old pennies, 4 x 1/240 of a Pound) in the slot, dialled the number and then pressed either Button A or B depending on whether it was answered or not. The recipient could not hear you unless you pressed Button A.

If this seems of very minor interest, I have to explain that Onus's new hobby stemmed from the fact that he had got hold of a brief instruction note, normally issued to GPO telephone engineers, which allowed them to make free calls. To put this into perspective, 4d was not a great deal of money, even for 12-year-olds, and none of us had anyone to call anyway, but it was something we were not supposed to know, and that was enough to get Onus fired up.

The phone-boxes had to cope with free emergency calls (999) and free operator calls (100), so the mechanism allowed the digits 1, 9 and zero to be dialled without charge, but as soon as the call number involved any other digit then the call could not be connected without money being paid. What Onus had found out was that the engineers used a system whereby they could tap in any digits which were not 1, 9 or zero on the receiver rest - and when I say "tap" I mean bang them in, quickly and evenly - thus "three" would be entered as "bang-bang-bang", etc. This took some skill, and I imagine telephone engineers would be likely to suffer from RSI.

There was a secret three digit code which should be tapped in (let us say it was 147), followed by a 2-digit number for the target exchange, followed by the phone number. Throughout this, free digits could be dialled, but other digits had to be tapped. The normal 3-letter exchange codes didn't work in this system, so Onus had set about collecting the details of the 2-digit exchanges.

So for a few weeks he and I would spend a lot of our lunch-hour in a very quiet phone-box in Green Lane, Childwall, about half a mile from school, banging the living daylights out of the receiver rest. Onus would do the banging and the talking, I would be in charge of writing down the results in his homework jotter and providing moral support. It goes without saying that we would have been promptly expelled from school if we had been caught doing this.

Onus would call up a number - let us say he dialled and tapped "147-14-2001". If the phone was answered, he would ask to speak to Mr Barrington (an unusual name was advisable, after some early flukes when he asked for "John", and the recipient said, "Speaking" - panic stations).

When it transpired that Mr Barrington did not live there, Onus would say, "I'm very sorry, I must have the wrong number - is that Garston 2001?"

and the recipient might say, "No - this is Aintree 2001."

And we would have scored a new code, 14 = Aintree, which I would write in the jotter.

Onus found out that if he varied the 147 code, we could get further afield, and we started to collect exchange codes for far-off, exotic places such as Colwyn Bay, Ashton-in-Makerfield, Burscough, some of which may have been as much as 20 miles away. We were giddy with excitement, though there was nothing practical we could possibly have used this knowledge for.

One wet lunchtime, about 3 weeks into this strange research project, our bangings were interrupted by the door of the phone-box being yanked open, and a police constable in full uniform - plant-pot helmet and everything - demanded to know what we were doing. I think Onus may have wet himself - he certainly didn't say anything. From some dark corner of self-preservation, I came up with, "We're trying to get his money back out of the phone...".

 

'Ello, 'ello?

The policeman reached in and pressed Button B, and, by some freak chance, 4 pence dropped into the tray. "Come on, lads - if you don't mind, I have to make an urgent call."

We ran back to school, pale and shaking. About halfway back, Onus announced that we had left his homework jotter behind in the phone-box, and it contained not only our recorded results for the exchange codes, but also his address (right down to which bit of the galaxy he lived in, and his phone number) and which class he was in, at which school. He was convinced that we were now doomed. 

I ran back to the phone-box, to find the policeman emerging. He had the homework jotter in his hand.

"Did you lads leave this? Here you are - you'd better be more careful, or you won't know what homework to do!"

I took it and ran all the way. Onus and I never mentioned the subject again. Since we were never sent to prison or expelled, I assume that the policeman had not spent any time watching us rattling out numbers on the receiver rest. In fact Onus and I were never such close friends thereafter. He eventually did biology and chemistry, while I did mathematics and physics, so we saw less and less of each other. I believe he became a science teacher and moved to Derbyshire - I only know this from reading his obit in the newsletter.

 

Newfangled STD phone - 1960s

Within a very short time after this adventure, maybe a year, the entire UK telephone system was upgraded to the new STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialling) system, which involved a complete nation-wide technology change and was, as far as I know, incapable of being cheated. I have never thought about hacking phone-boxes since then until this very morning.  

Honest, Your Honour.

Hooptedoodle #445 - Underpublicised Risks for Domestic Wireless Networks

 Yesterday I took delivery of a replacement router/hub for Chateau Foy, which is a lot more modern than the previous one and is giving a far stronger signal, and much faster speeds.

 Such has been the rate of arrival of wifi-enable gizmos here (and everywhere else, I guess) that we had a fairly full afternoon of reconfiguring phones, computers, tablets, smart TVs and printers for the address and password of the new router. The last item to be tweaked was the Canon printer in my office.

Different drill here. If you wish to alter any element of the domestic WLAN on this printer, you select a menu item on the device, and it gets you into a step-by-step instruction dialogue for idiots, though I suspect they have not often come across idiocy on the scale you can find here.

The display on the printer says:

...press and hold the WPS button on the access point [which means "the router"], then press OK on the device [which means "the printer"].

Now, since the router and the printer are in different rooms, this task obviously requires two people, so the Contesse kindly helped me out. She held in the WPS button on the router, and I pressed OK on the printer, two rooms away. For the next 5 or 6 minutes, the printer told me that it was "trying to connect to the access point". Eventually we cancelled the attempt. Tried twice more, with the same result.

I gave some serious thought to just using an old-fashioned USB cable to connect the printer to my iMac.

Decided to give it one last chance, so this time we swapped roles, and I did the WPS-holding job, while my wife climbed up on the rickety step stool in the office to press OK.

Same drill again, I held in the WPS button, prepared to hold it for half an hour if need be, and my wife shouted through that it was trying to connect. Then she said, "Maybe it doesn't work until you release your button?".

Hmmm.

I said, "But it says you have to hold it in, it says nothing about releasing it...", but the ache in my finger encouraged me to try releasing it. It connected immediately.

So I was pleased that we'd got everything changed over, but a little disgruntled that the connection instructions on the printer hadn't mentioned the need to release the WPS button.

On the other hand, it doesn't mention remembering to breathe during the operation either. If I'd only done what it said, I could have been in real trouble.

I've decided I need to re-evaluate my normal guidelines for applying commonsense when following instructions for idiots. Life is marvellous - every day you learn something useful.
   

Hooptedoodle #441 - Merlin Bird ID app

 I'm not a dedicated installer of apps for my phone, but my wife recommended this one, and I've been very pleased and impressed with it thus far.

It's called Merlin Bird ID, it's produced by Cornell Labs, and it's FREE*.

For anyone with an interest in wild birds, it's really useful. You can read about a bird you are interested in, you can identify a bird you don't know by a systematic analysis of its appearance and - wonder of wonders! - you can identify a bird by its song. One routine (though mind-blowing) feature is that you may start a recording on your phone, and as individual types of bird are identified by the software their names are listed.

The weather hasn't been great since I installed it, but my next mini-project is to take it for a walk down to the beach, because I really do need to understand more about the seabirds we have here. This reads like an advert, but it isn't - anyone out there who shares my enthusiasm for wild birds should maybe think about having a look.

When you first install the app, you are invited to download one of the available libraries of bird data and songs. I chose UK and Northern Europe - good choice. Only quibble so far is that there is no record of the Nightingale in that library - not that it matters a lot, since our chances of hearing a nightingale here are approximately nil, but it is a British resident. Maybe I can download more than one library? - no idea. Must check this out.

My wife has the Android version, I have the iPhone one - all very good and easy to use.

 

* the App Store, when asked to search for Merlin, came back with a different app with a very similar name and function, which - if you read carefully - is free for 7 days and then you will be billed about $30 a month. Presumably someone, somewhere was bunged to perform this sleight of hand, but in this age of Post-Truth marketing I guess we just have to remain alert. Whatever - watch your step.

Hooptedoodle #440 - Donkey Award - The Clowns Are Everywhere

 This morning's clowns are at Scottish Power, famous collectors of money and occasional suppliers of electricity. I received a text message on my phone - time to submit a new meter reading, it said. Good enough - I went to the desktop computer, entered the supplied URL and submitted a new reading.

While I was in there, I was reminded that my sign-in for my account there includes an email address which I no longer have. Ah - good opportunity to get that fixed, thinks I.

Went into my account details - I can edit just about anything, but no mention of email address. Oh well - there is a chat service on the internet site, so I asked about how to change my email address. The bot was able to answer that one, and it referred me to the screen of account information I'd just been looking at - the one that doesn't mention email addresses.

I must have been feeling energetic this morning; the original text message also recommended that I download and install their [award winning] phone app. So I did - that might be more up to date.

Excellent. It loaded, and opened up, and I was invited to log in. So I entered my old email address and my password, which is still correct.

That's right - you guessed. Since this was the first attempted log-in from my phone, I was told that they would have to check it was really me, so they had sent me a confirmatory email to my email address. The one I no longer have.

By this point my enthusiasm had dimmed. There is a phone number I can call, the website informs me. I have to say that I have phoned Scottish Power before - I have, in fact, spent many, many hours listening to music on that number, hoping that a person might eventually speak to me. Such a phone call will be necessary to sort out my problem, I guess, but it may be a while before I again feel happy and strong enough to try it. This is not the sort of thing I need during Caffeine Detox month.

Does anybody actually design these systems, or do they just grow out of the wall, underneath the sink?

 

Hooptedoodle #439 - Resumption of Normal Service

 In case you didn't miss me - I'm back!

This blog has been invisible to anyone apart from myself for a few days; if you were refused entry during this period, please don't take it personally. Regard it, rather, as a little holiday.

This short spell of solitary has been a further step to shift the attention of a nasty little bot which has been "scraping and copying" the content of my blog for years, and reproducing it on a supposedly legitimate website, along with a huge amount of other stuff, including news items and assorted clickbait, to generate advertising revenue. I shall not mention the name of this website (partly since I cannot utter the word without swearing aloud); let us just say that it is US-based, caters for software engineers, offering job adverts, techie tips and presumably providing yet another dark place where they may avoid doing any actual work or meeting any real people. I complained about it some years ago, but was afforded very little sympathy or help either by Google or the regulators.

Things appear to have moved on a little - work has been going on in the US to limit this kind of thing. I am gratified to note that it is now 3 months since one of my posts was ripped off; since this was pretty much continuous for years, I guess something has changed. Maybe the bots finally realised that my work was not quite on-stream for their readership.

Whatever, I've changed my Blogger settings back to "public", which is why you are able to read this, and, without wishing to tempt fate, I may have a beer with my lunch today.

Cheers!

Another New Gizmo - a Light-Box

 Something else to fiddle with. I seem to have had a sudden burst of energy this last week or two, and have ordered up a couple of things that I have been dithering about for a while. Yesterday I took delivery of a photographer's light-box, which is all new to me. I've been turning out poor photos of my soldiers for years now, and constantly saying how I'm going to buy (or make) a light-box. My entry into the twilight world of gloss varnish for my WSS figures has made photography even more tricky.

Anyway, I bought one. I bought a 16inch cube Neewer, and it arrived courtesy of Amazon's own delivery van. All good, apart from the fact that the driver leaned the box against my front door, which had just been painted, but there is another coat to go on, so it will be OK. You'd have thought that the groundsheet and the paint tins would have been a clue, but not so. Never mind.

If you have used one of these things (and a lot of people use them regularly, without making all the fuss I am) then you will be underwhelmed by my new venture!

The box folds flat for storage and transport, and it erects like some insane play-tent. If you are a Velcro freak you would love this. I got everything working, and now will have to read up a bit about how best to use it, but I'm happy with the apparent possibilities. That's another excuse crossed off the list; if my photos are still rubbish then it's down to me now.

I couldn't close without some evidence, could I? Here are some photos. I should have tried something shiny as well, but I'll work up to that.

 

I thought the 12inch one might be a bit cramped, so I got the 16inch; it has a ring of little LEDs in the top, and I set it up with a background sheet, and with the diffuser fitted. The light is controlled by a dimmer box

 

 

Here's a plastic kit building - the diffused lighting does away with the slightly soapy appearance you normally get with matt plastics

 

 

Naturally, I have to add some soldiers - 1/70eme - very smart

 

 

And, since I am an idiot, I tried switching the flash on as well, to see what happens - just makes the colours a bit paler, and adds some shadows. Still, it had to be done, I suppose

I believe a serious photographer would fall about laughing at my efforts, but I found it easy to use, if a bit fiddly to set up. I'll find out a bit more about how to make best use of it. If I find myself tempted to buy a better camera, I'll say so here, so you can shout at me and tell me not to be so daft.

Zoom - Back on the Nursery Slopes

 This follows on from my previous post on this topic, a couple of months ago.

My attempts at Zoom wargaming have been frustrating me because of the poor quality video, and I've decided I should get on with sorting this out. I can hang on to my "Pro" level Zoom account, for which I think I'm paying £14 a month, and try to get the visuals up to a satisfactory standard, or else I should get realistic about the short-term prospects for Zoom (for me), and drop down to the freebie account level, which is good for short chats with small numbers of attendees.

My Zoom set up is as it was two and a half years ago; a brave attempt, largely improvised using ageing mobile devices, suspended from gaffer tape and sky hooks. Heath Robinson for the 2020s. Since the Zoom service has improved in sophistication during the period, and my broadband speed is now about 3.5 times what it was, I was hopeful that I might utilise some better tech at my own end and try to make a difference. If it doesn't work immediately, the prices of the kit have dropped a lot as the pandemic has receded, and there is a good chance that the infrastructure will continue to improve, to justify the investment. 

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was very enthusiastic about - and pleased by - my early efforts with remote wargaming, and only gradually became aware that the video I was putting out for visiting generals was really rather crude, compared with how it looked at my end, and didn't necessarily offer a fulfilling experience.

So my new plan has been to use the two desktop machines in my den/office, which is adjacent to the room where my games are set up, and buy a couple of proper webcams.

At this point, I have to make public admission of a personal trait of mine; where others will go about things in a quiet, businesslike manner, and get good results with little or no fuss, I tend to thrash about and tell everyone about it, which makes it a bit less comfortable when it doesn't work! In the current situation, I think there may be one or two things I find out which may be of use to others having the same struggle, so I shall persist for the moment.

[At this point I must also acknowledge the advice and support I've had from Jon Freitag, who successfully runs games by Zoom which are very much like what I'd like to be hosting myself. I've visited Jon's set up and learned a lot, so I am truly grateful. A splendid fellow. Thank you, Jon.]

I purchased two Logitech StreamCams, which Amazon had on special offer, plus various bits and pieces - thread adaptors for microphone stands (I'll be using old mic stands to support the cameras) and what photographers apparently refer to as "ballheads" [which is a joy and a delight, since "ba'heid" is a children's insult of great and noble lineage in Glasgow] and a variety of USB cables. This stuff has all arrived now. Thus far things have gone pretty well, but I have learned a couple of things which might come in useful to others.

 

This is Camera B, at the East End of the table, on its microphone stand. The mic stands are very stable, and infinitely adjustable - also I have a few old ones of good quality, which is a selling point. The adjustment thing is maybe a mixed blessing - trying to get the same view twice might be a challenge! This is a trial placement, and the camera is 174cm from the floor, and 64cm horizontally from the centre of the table edge. [This is not unlike trying to get your car seat comfortably adjusted again after it's been serviced...] 

 

 

This is the Logitech StreamCam. At the top of the mic stand there is a 3/8" to 1/4" thread converter, and on top of that is the tripod-style "ballhead" - the camera screws straight onto a little platform supported on a lockable ball joint

Webcams

They work "plug & play", but I had problems immediately since they both produced images which flickered badly. Not unreasonably, being American, these cameras, which are smart enough to correct flicker caused by phase difference between the image refresh rate and the natural flicker of electric lighting caused by the frequency of the mains supply, assumed that I would have a respectable 60Hz rather than our British (almost said "European" - forgive me, O Lord) 50Hz, and flickered their disappointment. Easily fixed - I downloaded some device management software and re-set the flicker correction to the right speed. Finding out what was needed was a lot more tricky online - this obviously is not a problem in American colleges. Here's a nice man I found on the Web to tell you how to do this:

A couple of comments:

(1) The program you need (if you are a Logitech user) is no longer called the Logitech Camera Settings Software, but is now called Logi Tune, available from the Logitech site. This will only be of relevance for this brand of camera, but the flicker problem must be generic, so there will be equivalents.

(2) The flicker is at its worst if you use LED lighting, which is relentlessly strobe-like. Before the cameras were re-adjusted, I practically eliminated it using old-fashioned heated coil bulbs, but I was delighted to be able to reinstate my fancy 2500 lumen daylight LEDs, which are dimmable and also run very cool (and avoid wasting energy - always a fine thing).

USB Cables - Length Limits

 

The problem in hand - a plan: to replace the current tangle of old mobile devices, I have invested in a couple of webcams, shown here as A and B. To give a scale for the project, the room containing the wargames table is 5m x 3m, the table 8ft (to 10ft4in) x 5ft. The positioning of the laptop mentioned below is shown (under the table)

OK. I have to connect one camera to each of the Mac and the PC in the adjacent room (my office/study/den/hidey-hole). My experimentation bore out what are the industry recommendations. My cameras each have a 5ft cable hardwired in, and I have a number of female-to-male USB extension cables, in lengths of 3ft and 10ft. A camera connected through a 10ft extension plus a 3ft extension to one of the desktop computers will work OK, but that is the limit. Beyond that, the camera is not detected at the computer, so 5 + 10 + 3 = 18ft becomes a new fundament of Nature, like Planck's Constant, the speed of light and the number of oatcakes in a pack of Nairn's Rough Scottish.

I can, as it happens, manage quite easily to connect Cam B to the Mac with an 18ft cable, but I have no chance of getting anywhere near the PC from Cam A without exceeding the limit. 

Hmmm.

One solution might be the use of an active "repeater" cable - these are powered by a wall adaptor (5v), and include circuitry to amplify the signal, so can extend the overall range, which could be the answer. I may still try this, but I am not keen on solutions where I buy something in the hope it will work.

Or I could use my Windows laptop (which may actually be of higher spec than the PC), connected by a short USB cable to Cam A, instead. This is not as tidy, but it has proved to work, and I can place the laptop on a little coffee table, safely tucked under the main wargames table - once it is set up and connected to Zoom, I don't need to be able to see it. This is what I have adopted as my starting configuration.

 

Here's a screenshot of the view from Camera B in the position shown in the photos above. Camera A should be set up in the equivalent position at the other end. The picture resolution here is shown straight from the camera to my Mac, so it hasn't been anywhere near the Zoom server - I'll say something about picture quality when I've gained a little more experience of this configuration

That's more than enough for now. I have a lot to do, and try out, but there are no absolute stoppers yet. Ultimately, this stands or falls by the quality of the video output via Zoom. If that is unusable then I can either wait for the service to improve or leave the cameras to my kids. How can I lose? - all right - please don't comment on that bit.

 

***** Late Edit *****

OK - later the same evening, I've been checking over picture quality, comparing pictures that have not yet been sent to Zoom with incoming pictures from Zoom.

First off, I got a nasty fright. I was getting some pretty terrible, inconsistent results - blurring of images when I didn't expect this. I did a little reading, and tried switching off the autofocus on both cameras, using the Logi Tune app. Bingo - immediate improvement. Maybe the poor camera can't decide what to focus on, with a lot of little soldiers spread out. Maybe the level of lighting has an effect. No idea, but it seems much better with the autofocus off; I'll do some more reading tomorrow, and see what the terrible bad news is if you turn it off...

Anyway, with the autofocus put to sleep, and the manual focus set to minimum (deep focus), I did some screenshots, just for interest.

 

This is a screenshot of a picture coming in from the laptop (the remote participant, connected to Camera A), as seen on the Mac (which is the host here, attached to Camera B) - so this is "incoming", having been through Zoom

 

This is "outgoing", the view on the host's Mac from its own attached Camera B, which has not been to Zoom. You can't count buttons in either view, but the comparison isn't bad is it? I'll do some more work on this.

 

*********************
 

Zoom! - OOOOOH! - phut....

 I'm aware of other bloggers publishing rather splendid accounts of their remote wargames, and I'm very impressed, not to say envious.

I started off using Zoom for wargames with great enthusiasm early in the pandemic lockdown, I hosted a number of games, and I was very pleased and excited by the results and the potential. It was only later, when I took the trouble to find out, that I realised that the video quality I was sending out was so poor that it wasn't such a great experience for the generous friends on whom I was inflicting it. I was sent some very iffy-looking screenshots of what was visible at the far end, and then the Bold David mentioned that he was pleasantly surprised to see how attractive my wargame figures were, when he studied the photographs which I took during the refight of Kilsyth in which he had been involved. The wonders of what I could see on-site had nothing to do with his view, far, far away.

I confess my crest was more than a little fallen.

There was a time when it seemed possible that Zoom offered all that was likely to be available for the foreseeable future in the twilit world of Covid. I had a paid account, since I was involved with the musical activities of the Folk Club of a neighbouring town, and I'd learned a lot there about what could be achieved on a shoestring budget. For the wargaming, I had grandiose plans to spend money on a top-quality streaming video camera, to improve the pictures. My youngest son made the useful observation that I could spend what I wanted, but Zoom would take one look at the available bandwidth out here in The Sticks, and would automatically dumb-down the picture resolution to what it thought our broadband could sustain reliably.

 

Roman mosaic (low-resolution)

 

The set up I used here consisted of my (5-year old) Android tablet as the main camera/host, with my alter ego Max attending the sessions using my old iPhone to provide a second camera from the far end of the table. Both of these devices have excellent built-in cameras, and the pictures I can see on-screen at my end of the sessions look very good, but the cruncher has been the dreaded rural broadband. Our service arrives by radio broadcast (no, you read that correctly), by line-of-sight transmission from a hill about 8 miles away. The maximum service available was a humble 12Mb/sec, which may sound laughable but was easily the best of all the options available. No wonder, then, that my Zoom sessions produced pictures with the resolution of a Roman mosaic floor.

 

Traprain Hill - there's a transmitter up there somewhere

 

[In passing, I must note that when we were originally being sold the idea of the radio transmission service, one of my neighbours was not happy at all, since she believed that a line-of-sight transmission would not work at night - this has been one of the brighter moments in our experience.]

Well, time has passed, and my internet service provider has upgraded the kit, so we now get a handsome 32Mb/sec, which would still be regarded as a joke in Kensington but represents a whole new age of promise here. Buoyed up by the new possibilities, I roped in some brave volunteers to check out what effect this had on Zoom pictures, and I regret to say that it didn't seem to make any notable difference. The quality at the far end of the connection was still, to coin a technical term, duff.

 

The Far End view - this screenshot kindly provided by The Other David, captured in far-off Londinium. This is post-upgrade - the camera in use at this instant is the old iPhone at the West End of the table. Not terrible, but certainly not great.

  

So I wrote to the technical support people at Zoom. If you have never attempted this, by the way, I recommend you do not bother. They are pretty good at debiting money from your bank account very promptly, but their customer service is non-existent. It would be tempting to suggest it is about as bad as you can get, but my world survey is not yet complete; however, I think it must be up there.

So I am left to wonder what is possible. How do those guys out there successfully run remote wargames, with no-one getting frustrated or going blind?

* Despite our local pride in the upgrade, 32Mb/s may still be show-stoppingly slow. I tried connecting the devices directly (by cable) to my hub, rather than use the wi-fi, but it made no difference.

* I could try some more modern mobile devices, but that would cost money, and doesn't seem to offer any guaranteed improvement.

* There must be something in my Zoom settings, you would think, that would sort this out? Well there isn't. I can choose to have my wrinkles blurred a bit, or the background replaced by a photo of Miami, but the picture resolution appears to be a given.

* It does occur to me that the overall traffic on a Zoom session can be cut back a bit by switching off the video pictures from the remote generals, but at this point I am just tinkering with details.

That's about it, really. I am disappointed, since I got the Zoom games quite nicely organised, video quality apart. If I am not going to be able to improve this I shall stop the paid account and go back to the freebie one, which restricts the number of participants and the length of multiple sessions.

I would be really very pleased to get any useful advice here. I thought of moving to Kensington, but decided against it. 

***** Late Edit *****

I came across this notice on the Zoom site, which may be bad news; it seems that Zoom have restricted display on sessions involving more than 2 participants to "standard quality" rather than HD. It is hoped this is a temporary measure, and apparently it is because of Covid, and apparently it may only be Zoom that got us through Covid anyway. Humility does not seem to come naturally to Zoom's marketing people, but I guess we have to be grateful.

*********************

Hooptedoodle #405a - More Care and Attention from Curry's

 In case anyone was troubled by my recent rant on the subject of our adventures as customers of Curry's, the well-known idiots, here is a little update. 

Brief resumé: a new laptop had been ordered for my son to take to university, but Curry's sent him a PlayStation 4 gaming machine instead. A complaint was made, the unwanted PS4 was collected from our house the following day (25th August), and we know from the tracking number on the receipt we were given that it arrived in Newark (Curry's online sales centre?) within a day.

Since then? Well, not much has happened really. We had a number of meaningless phone conversations and chat exchanges which refused to confirm that the returned item had been received or been checked, and there was no commitment to a refund, which "can take 2 or 3 weeks" - this being, presumably, someone else's fault. 

Yesterday there was an email which stated that a replacement item (which I sincerely hope is a laptop) is being dispatched, and will be delivered "by 24th August". Yesterday, of course, was the 8th September. [I hope you are not laughing, at the back there.]

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. One certainty is that my son does not have any chance at all of receiving his computer before he goes away on Saturday. There are all sorts of exciting possibilities over what else might happen.

At no point has anyone said that they are sorry, or that they will do their best to rectify their stupid mistake, or anything else, really, that we might wish to hear. I can only suggest that any UK resident reading this should take great pains to avoid ever doing business with these cretins - save yourself a lot of grief, and do not give them the benefit of any profit on any such deal. It's not very likely, but if you happen to work for Curry's, or have friends who work there, then you have my sympathy, and please tell your employers that they smell very bad, and their days are numbered. Times are getting harder - businesses which cannot cope will fade away to make room for those which can. Online sellers have made a considerable fortune out of lockdown trade - sympathy is not what it might be.

Zoom - Firming Up

After learning that the world shortage of webcams, caused by demand during lockdown, has put the prices through the ceiling, I've been pottering around to see what else we can do in the short term. My Windows laptop was a big disappointment - the internal camera is very basic; I think the processing power is fine, so it might work well with an external camera (if I had one), but there is another constraint anyway, in that Zoom will only permit one computer, one tablet and one smartphone to be enabled under a single account, and my desktop Mac is already the heart of operations.

Righto - I had a shot with the Android tablet. I didn't expect a lot, but I have to say I'm very pleased with the results. I constructed various experimental stands to hold the thing, and had a couple of brief sessions with Goya and with Stryker today to see how things looked from their end. Very promising. It would be better, of course, to have two cameras on the job, but if the stand for the tablet is rigid enough and stable enough then I can take the tablet down when necessary, and offer views from other angles, or close-ups, or whatever the generals want. The beauty of the stable stand is that I can put the tablet back in its main vantage point without fiddling around adjusting everything.

The best arrangement we achieved has the tablet about 7 feet from the floor, tipped forward (on a music stand, in fact), looking down over one corner of the table. We tried various combinations of lights, with the curtains open and closed - eventually the best arrangement was with curtains closed and all the room lights on, with the camera pointing in a direction which minimised reflected light. The photos were taken by Goya, at the far end of the conversation - there is a little loss of resolution in the pictures, compared with my original screen view, but it certainly looks as though it will do the job.

Remote generals should be provided with paper maps of the table, and we'll improvise some sort of unobtrusive grid reference system to clear up any ambiguities - maybe some form of unit roster arrangement might be a good idea, too. Whatever - I think we can now go ahead. We hope to have a smallish Napoleonic game ready to roll in a week or three.

I'll continue to keep an eye on the insane world of webcams, but the pressure is off for the moment.

The view from 7 feet up in the air - screen capture from the far end of the link. A little clarity is lost in transmission, but it is surely good enough to get us going. My son points out that if I buy an expensive 1080p streaming camera Zoom will detect our rural broadband service, and default to 730p anyway. That would be a shame (though I do fancy a decent camera for creating videos anyway). The mugs do not indicate a mighty consumption of coffee, by the way, I placed them there in case we couldn't find the corners through the camera view. Needn't have worried, I think.

Fighting by Zoom?

Interesting session this evening, using the newly installed Zoom set-up for a 3-way chat  - Stryker, Goya and myself. Videoconferencing. We had some problems with my broadband playing up a bit, but it's obvious that this does offer the opportunity of some remote miniatures gaming. Quite exciting, really - Stryker showed us around the 6mm ACW game he is soloing in his hut at the moment - looks good.

I realise that a lot of people are already doing this, but it's unfamiliar to us, so a fairly trouble-free toe in the water would be a fine idea. We may change our minds at any time, of course, but at the moment the plan is that we should set up a 3-way game to try it out - and pretty soon.

Agreed Thoughts / Guidelines / Givens (any minute now we'll have a Terms of Reference):

(1) for a 3-player game, the host should be umpire and general runner-about, the remote attendees will be the two commanders.

(2) the first game shouldn't be too large, or we will put ourselves off.

(3) a gridded game would work well, since the table layout should be easily visible, and there is no scope for getting bogged down in (remote) measurement - it would also be useful for the commanders to have paper maps of the table/board, for their own reference.

(4) since I have a very clearly marked-out gridded table, and all the necessary figures, I could be the first host - and we might have a look at the CCN scenario 006 for The River Coa in the Peninsular War. We'll use my Ramekin dice-driven activation system, so we don't have problems with the Command Cards, and I'll do all the dice rolling at my end - on camera, of course [The Lovely Rita].

Lovely Rita in her previous job

My set-up ideas on this would be to have my (big, Windows 10) laptop in the games room, with (preferably) a dedicated webcam connected. If the webcam can just stream live video into the laptop through USB, then this full screen display of the battlefield can be offered via the Share Screen option in Zoom. Thus the default screen would be the normal Zoom Gallery view of the participants, with a Share Screen option of the tabletop action, as seen from the webcam (mounted on a fairly high tripod, angled down onto the table).

I assume that all this would work OK. Snag #1 is that I have to get my hands on a webcam. I realise it is possible to set up a smartphone or other device to work as the webcam, but I have an aversion to solutions involving gaffer-tape or wishful thinking, so an actual webcam which just works out of the box would be good, especially for a klutz like me - the scope for dropping an iPhone from a height of 2 metres is too obvious, and just think how that would spoil the game...

I see that the prices of conference-quality 1080p webcams are just about what you would expect - very high - but there are cheaper options, and the options are getting cheaper and better all the time. I had a look to see what is available second-hand on eBay, just to get some experience without busting the bank. When I checked these used items back against Amazon and elsewhere, I realised that, in general, new webcams are on sale cheaper than second-hand ones, and often the spec is better. This is obviously an area where technology is improving and prices are dropping fast. Hmmm.

I was looking at customer reviews on various pieces of kit - some of the Logitech units look good, but it's hard to tell with my current level of understanding without actually trying one out. That's as far as I've got - we have agreed that we would like to try something, and it would be nice if it worked without a huge amount of hassle. At this point I really would welcome some suggestions, if anyone has experience of this stuff, and would be kind enough to help out a little. Any camera recommendations? Any "don't ever do what I did" stories? All welcome.

One small downside of Zoom, of course, is that a "meeting" involving more than 2 people is limited to 40 minutes unless you have a paid account, in which case you are talking about $15 a month. As a loss leader, Zoom are currently waiving the 40-minute limit for new subscribers, and there are some supposedly "special" offers to help during the lockdown period. That's all fine, but I had a think about it. If multi-way Zoom is obviously a good thing to have access to - particularly if old chaps driving across Scotland with vans full of soldiers and scenery are likely to meet with the disapproval of The Polis for the foreseeable future, then $15 may be a snip. When I think about it, I currently pay a monthly amount for an Audible audiobook membership from which I haven't ordered anything for a while, and I also pay for a Spotify account which I never use.

I could get myself organised and save most of $15 a month with very little effort, so that's not such a disincentive. And, of course, I could then keep in contact with my long-lost relatives - two at a time, if need be. Hmmm.

If I can sort out what I need to do about a decent camera - and some reasonably decent ones are only about £30 these days - this looks rather like a goer.

Stryker does Zoom - scary